UWS POST PHASE=RUN

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi,

Let me extract these two parts from the conversation:

On Mon, Nov 03, 2014 at 11:33:25PM -0800, Matthew Graham wrote:
> The obvious exampled of a document-based JDL is VOSpace where data
> transfers are coordinated via UWS. The transfer resource that is
> posted to initiate a job is hierarchical and so could be difficult
> to map to a parameterized form. It gets stored under the jobInfo
> element for the UWS representation of the job.
> 
> On Nov 3, 2014, at 11:22 PM, Paul Harrison wrote:
> 
> > necessarily representable even under the <jobinfo> element -and I
> > agree that there was no intent that the generic JDL and DAL
> > ?parameter/value? mechanism could be mixed - which is why I was
> > suggesting that there be some conventions written into the
> > standard to make this separation clearer and make the language of
> > the standard stronger in section 2.1.11 - so that the suggestions
> > become ?should?s rather than ?best practice?.

As to Matthew's point, any single file can be represented in the
trivial parametrised from JOB=<blob>; UWS wouldn't know about any
internal structure then, but that's probably what's intended in these
cases anyway.

So the big trick is to represent <blob>, and I'd really like to
stress Paul's point here.  *If* we want to have these kinds of opaque
parameters in the UWS job description, that has severe consequences
in that we must say how non-XML would be represented (or outlaw it).
Also, what about largeish uploads?  Do we really want job documents
that are a couple of megabytes?  Gigabytes?

All this is to say: We have DALI UPLOAD, with its built-in option of
having both URL and inline uploads.  Something fairly akin to it
already works ok for TAP.  It solves the problem of content not
easily representable in XML, its representation always is of very
reasonable size (an upload name and a URL), and there's no
UWS-special tricks necessary.

Hence: I propose to deprecate POSTing anything but parameters encoded
browser-style (either form-encoded or as a multipart) and say opaque
JCL should come in a single parameter (I like recommending the name
JCL for it) if it's printable and short or be UPLOADed if it's not.

Cheers,

        Markus



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